BANGALORE: Comrade R’s trouble with women often meant free rum for some of us whom he considered worthy of being able to give a piece or two of advice. It was easier to explain things to Comrade R in a communist fashion, so after gulping down a couple of sixties, I told him: In 1920’s as Mikhail Shatrov describes in one of his plays, a “class approach” to love and sex was mooted by the self-appointed experts of which proletarian culture and was rubbished by Lenin and other sensible communists as “infantile disorder”.
In Shatrov’s play which was fresh in my mind, a speaker tells a bunch of youth, “We all stand for freedom of love, and for the satisfaction of this natural biological urge connected with the need of sexual gratification… I insist that for proletarian youth love must not be a waste of time.” “Just look at some bourgeois young man or woman in their so called period of puberty.
They spend the whole day brooding in the office or at school. They sigh, dream, write love letters and in the evening rush to their anxiously awaited dates. The young man spends a lot of time declaring the purity of his love while the young lady at the most allows him to kiss her hand. But since the young man is 18 or 20, sighs and kisses for him are by far not enough. So what does he do comrades? He goes straight from his rhapsodic date with his sweetheart to gratify his sexual urge elsewhere,” the speaker says.
The speaker then compares (with proletariat), “The young man gets his wages, gives half of them to his parents and from the other half buys his girl a pair of shoes, a ticket to the movies or takes her out to a dance. Their relations have no ups and downs, no disparity of emotions, no shilly shallying or any such thing. If they happen to break up, the girl switches over to one of her boyfriend’s pals, another solid worker. And there’s no tragedy. No emotional mess. No complications.” Later he says, “That is why contrary to this false bourgeois sex morality, Marxism already offers today a satisfaction of biological urges in society should be as simple as drinking a glass of water.” Which was understood by a worker (in the play) as follows, “Every Komsomol girl, every female working student, every female proletarian who is chosen by a male Komsomol member must respond as a class and a party comrade. Otherwise she is a philistine and unworthy of being a member of the Komsomol.” Comrade R was kicked (which man wouldn’t want a girl to drop her pants the moment he looks at her) about the class approach until I borrowed Lenin’s words and told him that the “glass of water” theory was rubbish.
“The freedom of love at any rate is not the freedom from what is genuine in love. Or a freedom of adultery. It is probably a freedom from material and financial considerations in live... a freedom from material burdens, from religious superstitions and social prejudice. From a father’s arbitrary restrictions, from the enforced bonds of the law, the courts and the police. It is the complete freedom of the human being at any time to say “NO”. Comrade R got up, spat and left.
bngexpresso@epmltd.com